An autobiographical description of the mental instability of sylvia plath in the novel the bell jar

Imagine living inside one of these. To describe the book in such terms is too limiting. This is a bell jar: Specifically with suicide, and specifically about the virtue and pureness of women compared to men. Strangely enough, if you remember in my last review, what bothered me most about The Good Earth did not bother me in The Bell Jar.

Esther shows us how depression can feel: Along with Anne SextonPlath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell and W.

Buddy and Esther had previously dated, and at one point Buddy was interested in marrying her. I believe a simple quote from The Bell Jar will say it all. Because the Esther, the character we are following, is slowly descending into madness, time no longer matters. They married inand after a brief stint in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith, they moved back to England in Plath gave birth to her first child, Freda, the following year.

She also gave birth to a daughter, Frieda Rebecca. That said, it seems evident that Esther was experiencing major depressive order, commonly known as depression.

Onlookers tend to mythologize Plath either as a feminist martyr or a tragic heroine. Her descriptions were crisp and precise, often using words that one rarely hears spoken or even read.

She shows little emotion, other than occasional irritability or anger. Analyzing things that go on around her and her surroundings.

Thought patterns are different than they would be without mental illness, and the stigma attached to mental illness can make it easy to believe that others are judging you.

She published her first poem when she was eight, in the Boston Sunday Herald. Leaving out bread and milk, she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with "wet towels and cloths. I thought there might be real interest in aiming for an "innocent" reading of The Bell Jar.

Plath most likely wrote a first draft of The Bell Jar in the late s. Throughout her short life, Plath felt the loss of her father. She graduated from Smith with highest honours in and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, in England, on a Fulbright fellowship.

On February 11,at the age of thirty, Plath took her own life by putting her head in the gas oven. It ignores the fact that so much of it is so funny. Although neither myth presents a wholly accurate picture, truth exists in both.

And though Plath never really described many characters as to their personality, I began to feel I knew them all intimately. He tries to convince her otherwise, to no avail.

Her health was poor and her income small, but she found time from four until eight in the morning to write, and it was during this period that she wrote the finest poems of her career.

Plath was not happy in New York, however, and on her return to Wellesley she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. No matter where the bell jar may be, there is possibility. The book really spoke to me because of my own personal experiences with depression and suicide.

Share via Email Sylvia Plath: She even misinterprets her mother.Sylvia Plath: for her The Bell Jar was ‘an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past’.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Sylvia Plath’s only novel. Test your knowledge of The Bell Jar with our quizzes and study questions, or go further with essays on the context and background and links to the best resources around the web.

Sylvia Plath struggled with mental illness, and, tragically, she took her own life inthe same year The Bell Jar was released (originally under a pseudonym).

In the novel, it is Esther’s attempted suicide, the result of inner torment, that lands her in psychiatric hospital after psychiatric hospital. The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel that conforms closely to the events of the author’s life.

Sylvia Plath was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath in and spent her early childhood in the seaport town of Winthrop, Massachusetts. Reading group: Art and autobiography in The Bell Jar The parallels between Sylvia Plath's life and this novel are so close, and painful, it's very hard to read it .